Under the Gun Part 2: As NYPD targets gun possession, communities sound alarm

This story, the second in our new series about the enforcement of illegal gun possession in New York City, details the impact of aggressive enforcement strategies like stop-and-frisk and the gang database on targeted communities. Read Part 1 here.

It was a chilly day in January. Byron Benadith, 16, was walking down Rockaway Avenue in Brownsville, Brooklyn, when he spotted a car driving slowly behind him. He recognized that it was the “D’s” — an unmarked police car — but he thought, “I don’t even care. Like, I didn’t do nothing. I’ll just keep walking.” 

Suddenly, though, the car sped up, and an officer jumped out.  

“He hopped out, and I was like, ‘Oh, my gosh.’ I started recording,” Benadith recalled. “I was like, ‘I don’t consent to no search.’ He just started grabbing me up, he started feeling everything, feeling my pockets.”

In the video, the officer explains the reason for the stop, saying, “It looked like you had a gun in there.” 

The encounter ends when the officer does not find anything, and Benadith walks away.

A few days later, Benadith shared his experience with Tatiana Hill, a Community Organizer at the Office of the Community Liaison (OCL). OCL was established in collaboration with the NYPD Federal Monitor—an office tasked with ensuring NYPD’s stop-and-frisk practices are constitutional—to track community member concerns around stop-and-frisk. Benadith was attending an event OCL hosted in Brownsville to discuss how residents were being impacted by stop-and-frisk and educate them on their rights during police encounters.

Hill later said that this was likely a legal stop-and-frisk, which requires reasonable suspicion that a person is armed and dangerous. The officer could say that he noticed a bulge indicative of a weapon that allowed him to frisk, or pat down, that area. If the officer had performed a search, by going into Benadith’s pockets, he would have required a higher legal threshold. 

But the legality of the stop was immaterial to Benadith. 

“That ruined my whole day,” Benadith said. 

The NYPD acknowledged the stop, but did not comment on the content of the video. The officer in the video—whose uniform identifies him as Vishwanand Raghubir—did not respond to a request for comment. He is a member of one of the NYPD’s Neighborhood Safety Teams, the latest iteration of specialized units sent to neighborhoods with the goal of finding illegal guns. 

Neighborhood Safety Teams: “A horrible example of policing”

The NYPD has policed illegal gun possession using specialized units for decades. The current version of these units are Neighborhood Safety Teams (NSTs), introduced in 2022 under former mayor Eric Adams.

NSTs patrol selected neighborhoods making largely self-initiated stops, frisks, and searches of people they suspect are carrying a weapon. The units generally consist of four to six officers and are active in about thirty precincts. The NYPD says it chooses which precincts to deploy them in based on rates of gun violence.

The previous version of these units were known as anti-crime units. They were criticized heavily for their aggressive and sometimes violent tactics and briefly disbanded after the George Floyd protests in 2020. Despite promises of better training and oversight, NSTs have faced similar criticism since their introduction.

The nonprofit news website New York Focus reported that many members of the initial class of NST officers had histories of excessive force complaints, undermining Mayor Adams’s claims that the new units would have officers with “squeaky clean” records. 

Adams also said that the NYPD Monitor would oversee the units to ensure constitutional compliance. But the Monitor has since released multiple audits that found that NSTs were making elevated levels of unconstitutional stops. 

In the most recent audit published in 2025, the Monitor reported that 74% of stops NSTs made for suspected criminal possession of a weapon (CPW) were lawful, and that just 54% of CPW frisks and 47% of CPW searches were lawful. Yet the NYPD supervisors overseeing NSTs and the other units assessed in the audit found that 99% of stops and 99% of frisks and searches were lawful. 

The Monitor has attributed this high incidence of unconstitutional stops to the fact that NST officers largely make self-initiated stops, rather than stops based on a radio run or a tip. 

Nearly 90% of the stops assessed in the audit were of Black or Hispanic men. This finding coincides with data showing that people of color, particularly young Black men, are more likely to be stopped and frisked by the NYPD.

These reports substantiate what community members experience day-to-day. Mikeyy Williams, 25, grew up in NYCHA’s Roosevelt Houses in Bedford-Stuyvesant. He said that NST officers and officers from Police Service Area 3, which patrols NYCHA developments, frequently harass him and his friends.

“In the wintertime, it could be like, I’m going home, I can have my hands in my pocket. They will come, stop, [and] approach me,” he said. “Why do I have to take my hands out? Why do I have to give you my ID? Like, why I just can’t say it’s cold outside… Why do I have to have a weapon on me, or a gun or something like that? I don’t have none of that.”

Justin Napper is the founder of the Andrell Napper Foundation, a youth empowerment organization in East Harlem focused on violence prevention. He says NST officers are a constant and unwelcome presence in the neighborhood, and he frequently hears stories about harassment from the youth he works with.

“The Neighborhood Safety Teams [are] a horrible example of policing,” he said. 

In one instance this December, Napper said that he had to confront a group of NST officers who shined flashlights into his car while he was driving high schoolers around to post flyers in the neighborhood. 

“They were antagonizing the kids… I was outraged. I was upset,” Napper recalled.

“Prior to them walking off, I said that’s exactly why I’m out here doing what I’m doing. And I showed … the flyers we were putting up, and one was a Know Your Rights [flyer] for the police brutality that they got going on in our community, using their whim at any given time to just harass us,” he said.

The use of NSTs continues under Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who recently announced that more of these units would be deployed to the Bronx. The Mayor’s office did not respond to AmNews’ requests for comment on this article. 

The NYPD defended the conduct of Neighborhood Safety Teams. 

“Our Neighborhood Safety Teams… proactively address gun violence, violent crime, and persistent quality-of-life complaints. They employ creative crime reduction, precision policing, and community engagement strategies to effectively improve quality of life, increase trust and [build] relationships with the people and communities of New York,” a spokesperson said.

The revival of stop-and-frisk

The introduction of NSTs coincided with a dramatic increase in the overall number of stop-and-frisks recorded under the Adams administration. The NYPD recorded over 26,000 pedestrian stops in 2025, the highest total since 2014. 

The NYPD’s use of stop-and-frisk has long been the subject of criticism. During the administration of former mayor Michael Bloomberg, the number of stops reached a peak of almost 700,000 in 2011. In 2013, a federal judge ruled that the NYPD’s use of stop-and-frisk was unconstitutional, finding that the practice violated the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments and was a form of racial profiling. The Federal Monitor began overseeing the NYPD’s use of stop-and-frisk after this ruling.

Following this decision, the number of recorded stops plummeted to as low as 8,947 in 2021. Supporters of stop-and-frisk under Bloomberg often justified the practice by saying it prevented gun violence. But gun violence rates declined as the number of stops declined.

Police rarely find weapons during these stops. The NYPD recorded 12,586 stops for suspected criminal possession of a weapon in 2025 and recovered a gun in 833 of these stops, a 7% recovery rate. 

“What’s happening is [the] NYPD, as they’re going out allegedly seeking out guns, they’re harassing tens of thousands of people, and subjecting them to unlawful stops and searches and racial discrimination,” said Karina Tefft, an attorney at the Legal Aid Society who has called for the units to be disbanded.

“The harms of that are very very serious and lasting, when really it’s only in a tiny fraction of these stops that officers are actually recovering guns or other contraband,” she added.

Research shows the consequences of frequent police contact include worse academic outcomes and adverse health outcomes, including higher levels of trauma and anxiety.

The use of stop-and-frisk and the conduct of specialized units like NSTs has fueled distrust between community members and police. 

“It marginalizes us more knowing that [when] we’re coming out of our [home] to go to the store, we don’t have the basic liberties that one should have as [a] citizen… [An officer] being able to walk up and direct you and swipe you, shove you, grope you, it takes a sense of your dignity away,” Napper said. 

Mauricia Harry, another community organizer with OCL, echoed these concerns. 

“[The youth] feel like the cops are bullies. The youth [have] also lost a lot of friends and people in their family due to gun violence… and a lot of these specialized units, in the youth perspective, have been taunting them… they may taunt them by saying something about someone that is deceased, that’s close to them, and that may rouse some anger,” she said.

Williams, who has lost multiple friends to gun violence, said that this once happened to him.  

“They just came, driving past, talking about our dead friends,” he recalled.

A new lawsuit

This practice is not just limited to pedestrian stops. The city is facing a new lawsuit challenging its vehicle search policy for being racially discriminatory. The lawsuit was filed in January and is ongoing. It was brought by the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU), the Bronx Defenders, and Milbank LLP on behalf of the NAACP New York State Conference and two Black New Yorkers whose vehicles were searched by the NYPD.  

The lawsuit explains that the NYPD’s vehicle search policy directs specialized units like NSTs to conduct vehicle searches for weapons. Using NYPD data on vehicle stops, the lawsuit showed that these searches increased under former mayor Eric Adams’ administration, including by 83% between 2023 and 2024. 

“Just like with stop-and-frisk, that was motivated by trying to recover guns. This is a similar policy that is motivated by the effort to recover guns,” said Daniel Lambright, NYCLU’s lead counsel for the lawsuit.

The lawsuit alleges that the NYPD’s vehicle search policy leads officers to search cars of Black and Latino drivers without reasonable suspicion or probable cause. Instead, the suit claims, officers make stops based on hunches, relying on stereotypes that these drivers are likely to be carrying illegal weapons. 

The lawsuit claims that 84% of individuals who had their vehicles searched between December 2022 and September 2025 were Black and Latino, despite their accounting for a smaller share of stops (29% and 28%, respectively). Black drivers stopped by the NYPD were almost ten times more likely to have their vehicles searched than white drivers, and Latino drivers were almost six times more likely than white drivers to have their vehicles searched.   

“What occurs is that often young Black or Latino men in particular are pulled over for minor traffic violations. And for most people, especially white people, a minor traffic violation leads to nothing more than… a ticket, or sometimes you get a warning, and you can go on with your day,” Lambright explained.

“[But] what happens in these situations is that the officers, without any basis to believe that the individual is carrying weapons, or is near a weapon, will search the vehicle.”

The NYPD did not respond to AmNews’ request for comment on this lawsuit. In the past, they have argued that the racial disparities in searches can be explained by the fact that officers are deployed to areas with higher rates of crime, many of which have larger populations of residents of color. Yet Lambright said that this defense doesn’t explain the disparities in vehicles searched.

“Even if there are officers who are deployed to certain areas based on crime… that only leads to maybe some disparities in the amount of people stopped. But it doesn’t explain why the disparities are so large between the people stopped versus the people searched,” he explained. 

The NYPD was also more likely to search the vehicles of Black and Latino drivers regardless of where in the city the stops occurred, the lawsuit states.  

Similar to pedestrian stops, the vehicle stops also rarely resulted in gun recoveries. Pointing to NYPD data, the lawsuit alleges that 96% of vehicle searches made between January 2022 and September 2025 did not result in an arrest for criminal possession of a weapon (CPW), and that searches of white drivers were more likely to result in an arrest for CPW than searches of Black or Latino drivers. 

“They’re failing because they utilize race as a proxy for criminality, and that’s just wrong and unconstitutional,” Lambright said. 

Lack of accountability 

Felipe Rodriguez, a retired NYPD officer and an adjunct professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, defended the NYPD’s strategies for finding illegal guns, including stop-and-frisk and specialized units. He said that continuous officer training is necessary to ensure these units don’t become overly aggressive. 

“They’re doing a good job. They’re getting the guns off the street. But … they need to have good supervisors, and they need continuous training to make sure that we are going within the parameters of the law,” he said.

However, critics argue the conduct of specialized units does not result from a lack of training, but rather a culture of impunity within the NYPD. A report from the Monitor’s office in 2024 highlighted issues with NYPD discipline, finding that officers were rarely penalized for unconstitutional stops, frisks, or searches, even when substantiated by the Civilian Complaint Review Board.

The NYPD monitor’s NST audit also emphasized that a lack of training did not explain the high levels of unconstitutional stops, noting the extensive training NST officers have received.

“It’s really critical that we have more protective policies that limit the authority that cops have to stop, frisk, and search people,” Tefft said. “But those policies won’t matter if the cops don’t care about following those rules, if they aren’t facing consequences for breaking those rules, and they don’t understand why the rules exist. So that I think is very much a culture problem, and not just a policy problem.”

The Monitor’s 2025 year-end report reiterated that the NYPD stop-and-frisk policy had failed to come into compliance with the Constitution, and criticized the Department for failing to provide meaningful accountability or discipline for officers who were found to make unlawful stops. 

“Reliance solely on training without discipline has proven to be ineffective,” the Monitor wrote.

The gang database 

The NYPD’s use of stop-and-frisk is particularly intense for individuals added to its Criminal Group Database, also known as the gang database. The NYPD has touted the database, which dates back to 2013, as an important investigative tool that helps them find illegal guns and prevent violent crime. After a shooting, for example, the NYPD says that it determines if any one involved is in the database and deploys resources accordingly. 

When asked for comment on the gang database, the NYPD referred to the testimony of Michael Gerber, NYPD Deputy Commissioner of Legal Matters, at a City Council hearing last year.

“If we know from the Database that a shooting victim is a gang member, the identities of rival gang members, and where those gangs are based, we can immediately deploy officers in a way that will help prevent retaliatory shootings,” Gerber said.

But critics argue that the NYPD uses the database for more than simply investigating violent crime, and that officers subject Black and Brown New Yorkers on the database to heightened surveillance without sufficient evidence that they are part of a criminal group. 

These advocates contend that the gang database was a response to the legal challenges to the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk program. 

“So stop-and-frisk is being taken off the table, and the NYPD pivots to warehousing information about young Black and Brown people. That’s why sometimes the gang database is referred to as stop-and-frisk 2.0; other people refer to it as digital stop-and-frisk,” said David Moss, a counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. 

In April 2025, a coalition of civil rights groups including the Legal Defense Fund and the Legal Aid Society filed a lawsuit alleging that the database is unconstitutional, violating the First, Fourth, and Fourteenth Amendments. In December, a judge denied the city’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit, and the lawsuit is ongoing.

The lawsuit features plaintiffs who were placed on the database, each of whom maintain they have never been a member of a criminal group. The plaintiffs, three Black men who grew up in NYCHA developments, reported increased police scrutiny due to the database. This scrutiny included frequent stops and arrests for low-level offenses that led to prolonged detention in precincts and invasive questioning.

One of the plaintiffs, identified by the pseudonym “Bryan Bradley,” has been frequently stopped by police, including those from specialized units. At one point during a stop, he was told by an officer, “we know you know where the guns are.”

Even after Bradley was moved from the “active” to “inactive” list in the database, he continued to experience frequent stops and detainments.

This surveillance extends online. The lawsuit alleges that Bradley has received messages on social media from officers posing as someone he knows, including one who asked “where the guns at?”

Moss said that the gang label, which appears when an officer runs a person’s name through their computer system, makes people on the database a target for repeated police encounters.

“These are officers who probably oftentimes are patrolling your neighborhood every day. So it’s not just that one time that they run your name. It’s after that, every time they see you. They think that when they see you, they are looking at a dangerous person,” he said.

“And so it leads to really harmful encounters, where the same people are being stopped and frisked constantly and arrested constantly and … interrogated constantly.”

An investigation by the city’s Department of Investigation published in 2023 found that 99% of people on the database are Black or Hispanic, mostly between the ages of 18 and 32. The report concluded that the NYPD’s methods for adding people to the database were deficient. People could be added to the database based on their use of certain emojis on a social media post, or commenting “happy birthday” on the Facebook page of someone who is labeled as a gang member. 

The NYPD has since implemented some reforms to the database, and the Department of Investigation said in a 2025 report that the NYPD has “made substantial improvements to its handling of the database.” The number of people in the database has declined from as high as 34,000 in 2014 to 7,700 as of April 2026. 

Still, critics claim that the criteria remain too broad, and are pushing to abolish the database. As a candidate, Mayor Mamdani also called for the abolition of the database, calling it a “vast dragnet.” But since coming into office, he has indicated that he is satisfied with the reforms the NYPD has made.

According to NYPD testimony at the city council meeting last year, more than 75% of people in the database had not been convicted of a felony, and more than two-thirds had not been identified as shooting perpetrators or suspects. 

“This isn’t to say that gangs or crews don’t exist in New York City. This isn’t to say that gun violence doesn’t exist in New York City. I think the real takeaway is that the NYPD is very ready, willing, and able to make up its own rules about how it defines gangs, how it defines gang membership, and what it means to be affiliated with a ‘gang’ in order to essentially do whatever it wants, surveil whoever they want, and initiate police encounters with whomever they want,” Moss said. 

This increased surveillance leads people to change how they behave in their community. The plaintiffs in the lawsuit reported being reluctant to attend community gatherings in their neighborhoods, or even bring their children to local playgrounds. 

Aaliyah Guillory-Nickens, a community organizer from Harlem, says this impact is common.

“In the summertime… say you want to have a cookout with some friends, you want to celebrate, you want to grill, you want to play music and stuff like that. If you’re on a database now and you’re just chilling outside having that cook out, police are more prone to stop you, to maybe detain you, to frisk you, to ask you questions, because you’re on that database, and that’s only because of the community you come from,” she said.

Moss says there is a harmful interplay between the NYPD’s use of the database and its specialized units, as he has observed “an enormous geographical overlap between the police precincts where NSTs are used, and the police precincts where the gang database is being most heavily used.”

“I think it reflects a sort of feedback loop where the same communities are being overpoliced by NSTs, they are having their young people just funneled into the gang database, and then police are using that fact to send more officers into those communities and [make] more arrests,” he said.

The next article in this series explores one alternative to aggressive gun possession enforcement as a way to combat gun violence.